Rule Forty Two: The Self-Aggrandizing Website of Gavin Edwards

For your holiday-weekend contemplation, a few more photos from my April visit to the auction-house exhibition of the contents of Michael Jackson’s Neverland.

posted 3 July 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

Aside from its ultramegahugeness, there are some aspects of Thriller that wouldn’t be the same today.

A. If it was released now, it wouldn’t be sequenced the same way. Here’s your all-star lineup: (side one) 1. “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” 2. “Baby Be Mine” 3. “The Girl Is Mine” 4. “Thriller” (side two) 5. “Beat It” 6. “Billie Jean” 7. “Human Nature” 8. “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” 9. “The Lady in My Life.” The conventional industry wisdom now is to front-load your strongest material as much as possible, because many listeners will never make it past the first three songs, but after the kickoff of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” side one seriously drags. Michael knew people would stick around for side two. (That same confidence is why he released a trifle like “The Girl Is Mine” as the album’s first single.)

B. Only a few years later, every song on the album would have had a video. Everyone remembers the Thriller videos; at the time, it didn’t seem odd that there were only three of them.

C. A year into its chart run, Michael started competing with himself! “Say Say Say,” his second duet with Paul McCartney, was on the charts at the same time as “P.Y.T.”–and did much better, lodging at #1 for six weeks, while “P.Y.T.” just made it to #10. At least it was the same record company in that case, so they could mark it all up to the bottom line. But a few months later, Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” with hugely prominent backing vocals by Jackson, was on the charts at the same time as “Thriller.” I think CBS Records just said “screw it, this thing’s unstoppable.”

posted 2 July 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

My dad worked at CBS Records (as Sony Music was then known) in the 1980s and programmed the computer systems that handled a lot of their internal bookkeeping. I remember two details he told me about Thriller, which sold so many copies it routinely overwhelmed the computer:

1. One quarter, it accounted for one half of all CBS albums sold everywhere in the world. (Keep in mind that this was not a small label–they had Bruce Springsteen, Men at Work, and Journey, among many other hitmakers of the era.)

2. At a point where everyone assumed the format was dead, including people inside the company, there was a small but steady stream of Thriller eight-track tapes being sold; as near as anyone could figure out, they were being stocked at truck stops.

posted 2 July 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

“In eighteen months, he never once called me by my name… I have a lot of respect for him, but his manners need a little work.” –Sheryl Crow

“We love Michael so much, we let the first kid slide.” –Chris Rock

“You got to put the jelly on the jelly.” -Michael Jackson

posted 2 July 2009 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

Is there anything groovier than the first fifteen seconds of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”? Over a buzzy bassline, Michael Jackson talks in a voice that’s as close to his natural speaking voice as most people would ever hear (the breathy falsetto was a guise he adopted when in public). “You know, I was, I was wondering,” he says, almost slurring and stumbling over his words. “If, if we could keep on.” It sounds unrehearsed in a way that his music never does–even at his best and most joyous, Michael had the precision of a surgeon. “Because the force, it’s got a lot of power, you know?” (Nobody ever talks about the Star Wars inspiration for this song, but I bet he meant the Force.) “It make me feel like, it make me feel like–oooooh!”

posted 2 July 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

Trying to remember when I first became aware of Michael Jackson, I realized I had two separate exposures to him around the age of ten–and I’m not sure that as a child, I realized both came from the same person.

I vividly remember hearing the ballad “She’s Out of My Life” on AM radio, particularly at the town swimming pool. I was fascinated by it. It was overwrought and intense and exhausting and connected to emotions I didn’t really understand. It didn’t sound like anything else on the radio and it always felt like it lasted about seven minutes until the singer had his nervous breakdown at song’s end.

I also was an avid watcher of the Jackson 5 cartoon series. I remember only one episode now: the group breaks up, which meant that their fans had to buy five separate records and play them all at the same time to hear their new song.

posted 2 July 2009 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Lester Bangs’ eulogy for Elvis Presley. In some ways, I suppose the career of Michael Jackson undermines his point–but the sentiment has never in my life seemed so true.

If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.

posted 1 July 2009 in Excerpts. 1 comment

When the news of Michael Jackson’s death started to leak out, I was on a plane to Texas. So I missed those first few hours of conflicting reports–what I got was a flat announcement from a woman with a cell phone one row in front of me, ten seconds after the plane hit the Dallas tarmac: “Michael Jackson’s dead.”

I wasn’t shocked, exactly; he seemed as fragile as a china doll. But I’m still getting used to this version of the world.

More soon. Previously:
Photos from the Neverland auction (outside)
Photos from the Neverland auction (inside)
1988 Countdown #94: “Another Part of Me”

posted 1 July 2009 in News. no comments yet

More Andy Warhol:

Tuesday, June 21, 1977

There was a black guy at the door of the Rainbow Room who didn’t know me and wouldn’t let me in and then another guy came to the door and it turned out to be this guy who always tells me that he wants his lobster pot back. He came to my house with a bunch of people once and says that he brought a lobster pot that he cooked in and then he says it’s still at my house and I don’t ever know what he’s talking about. I go crazy every time this guy starts up because it’s always the same routine! If he sees me in thirty years it will still be: “Give me back my lobster pot.” So he came out and said, “Oh, come right in, Mr. Warhol,” and at first I didn’t recognize him and as soon as we got in the door he turned on me and said, “Where’s my lobster pot?” and I thought, Oh this just can’t be happening to me again. Oh no, oh no no no no no no…. Then the guy had to go back to the door and we got away.

posted 29 June 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet

Taken two weeks ago, around the corner from my house, a short waddle from the puddle in the street where they had set up temporary residency.

posted 26 June 2009 in Photos. no comments yet